Fig. 4

Lévy mutation mode vs local mutation (one-point mutation). a Hamming distance distributions vs. target structure lengths. b Number of generations distributions for different length groups. In both (a) and (b), lower values indicate better performance. The target structures are solvable in less than 100 generations for both mutation schemes and most length groups. Still, the difference in the number of generations gets more significant as the target lengths increase, except for the two last length groups for which both mutation schemes mostly failed. The highest difference in terms of median number of generations is 150 for target lengths in the range [124–144] (respectively 123, 49, 46, 16, 7, 0, 0 for the length ranges [84–104], [64–84], [104–124], [44–64], [24–44], [144–164], [164–184]). Averaging over all length groups, the median number of generations difference between the Levy mutation and the one point mutation is 48 generations